Le Journal du Dimanche printed a loyal address made by President Hollande to Jacques Delors on the occasion of the old emperor’s nintieth birthday.

Here are some extracts, translated by me and Messieurs Google et Bing:

“Because Europe can only advance if it carries the idea of ​​transcendence. No nation can contemplate giving up part of its sovereignty if it is not satisfied that it will emerge stronger from this process. He [Delors] intuited that out of the crisis, Europe needs to define a new horizon that can give rise to a new hope, because he knows that the European idea runs out of steam when it is no longer put into action.”

“What threatens us is not too much Europe but too little.”

“The eurozone has managed this week to reaffirm its cohesion with Greece.

The quality of the Franco-German relationship had a great deal to do with it. The European spirit prevailed. But we cannot stop there. I have offered to take forward Jacques Delors’s idea for a Government of the euro area with the addition of a specific budget and thus also a Parliament to ensure democratic control.”

Found via Bloomberg and the Drudge Report. The French original can be seen at the first link. Is he really saying what I think he’s saying? A unified Eurozone government?

The hackers from the Anonymous International have disclosed thousands of text messages sent to and by Timur Prokopenko, deputy chief of the Domestic Politics Department of the Russian Federation’s Presidential Administration.

[…]

The messages dating back to March 2014 also mention Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right National Front, and contribute to better understanding of the relations between Russia and Le Pen’s party.

[…]

These communications correspond well to the developments in March 2014. Le Pen did not indeed go to Crimea, but her contemporary adviser on international relations, Aymeric Chauprade, went to observe the “referendum”. The French newspaper Libération informed, with a reference to Chauprade’s entourage, that he had been invited to monitor the “referendum” by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy and Elections (EODE), a Belgium-based NGO run by Belgian extreme right activist Luc Michel. Together with the pro-Kremlin, Poland-based European Centre for Geopolitical Analysis, the EODE was responsible for inviting international monitors to observe the “referendum” in Crimea. However, the National Front denied that the EODE had invited Chauprade, as the party feared that the publicized relationship with the Belgian right-wing extremists could damage the reputation of the National Front, especially on the eve of the municipal elections.

Whilst the Le Pen/Putin association is hardly a secret, it is always fascinating to see the spider-web of links amongst amongst Europe and Russia’s assorted fascists.

If Capaldo’s claims were right, Europe should have economically disintegrated as a result of its trade integration with any other part of the world. The Capaldo reasoning suggests that Europe’s trade integration with China, for instance, would have fractured EU economic integration. In fact, European economic integration deepened considerably even though import competition from the Asia-Pacific increased significantly over the past two decades.

According to the Capaldo reasoning, economic integration within the European Single Market should have triggered a tremendous fall in wages and employment due to the greater exposure of EU economies to trade and the proclaimed negative impact on income and aggregate demand. None of this has happened.

But said Russian minister also seemed to be suggesting Norway does not really have sovereignty over Svalbard. However that is not really what the Svalbard Treaty says, not that the Kremlin is known for worrying over much about such niceties.

First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Kalashnikov contested the full sovereignty of Norway to Svalbard. Norway previously demanded an explanation after a visit to the archipelago Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is part of the EU sanctions list

Under the Svalbard Treaty the peninsula is not supposed to host bases but is not actually ‘demilitarised’ as such, so now might be a nice time for the Norwegian army to send a company on an extended posting up north.

In an interview in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Russian ambassador to Denmark, Mikhail Vanin, said he did not think Danes fully understood the consequences of joining the programme.

“If that happens, Danish warships will be targets for Russian nuclear missiles,” Vanin told the newspaper.

What exactly are people supposed to hear? What I am hearing is…

“Yes I know you would rather spend your taxpayer’s money on outreach programmes for gay radical muslim single parent transgendered climate change threatened whales, but we really really want you to get those defence budgets up to the NATO required 2% figure!”

What reaction are they expecting to overt threats pretty much explicitly saying “if you, as a NATO nation, assist NATO with the deployment of a defensive weapon system within NATO borders, we will point nukes at you!”

Might this not be a tad counter-productive when the Russian Troll Army are tirelessly trying to convince assorted useful idiots to push the line that “Russia is no threat to anyone, honest guv!”…?

Unfortunately, this is not what many Greeks (or Spaniards) believe. A large plurality of them voted for Syriza, which wants to reallocate resources to wage increases and subsidies and does not even mention exports in its growth strategy. They would be wise to remember that having Stiglitz as a cheerleader and Podemos as advisers did not save Venezuela from its current hyper-inflationary catastrophe.

There are several things in this article that I think are very debatable and damn I hate seeing people describe spending less of other people’s money as “austerity”, but this is an interesting piece nevertheless.

If Russia now presumes to dictate what should be the constitutional order in Ukraine and if he has gained the assent of the German chancellor and the French president, Landsbergis continues, then the world has the right, even the obligation to ask, “when will you begin to observe the [Russian] Constitution, Mr. Putin?”

[…]

The Lithuanian leader said that he was disappointed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel apparently accepted Putin’s “puppet theater” when she suggested that the Kremlin leader had put pressure on the separatists to sign the agreement. To say that is also to give them a status independent of Moscow which they do not deserve.

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